Synopses & Reviews
Pictures from the past powerfully shape current views of the world. In books, television programs, and websites, new images appear alongside others that have survived from decades ago. Among the most famous are drawings of embryos by the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel in which humans and other vertebrates begin identical, then diverge toward their adult forms. But these icons of evolution are notorious, too: soon after their publication in 1868, a colleague alleged fraud, and Haeckeland#8217;s many enemies have repeated the charge ever since. His embryos nevertheless became a textbook staple until, in 1997, a biologist accused him again, and creationist advocates of intelligent design forced his figures out. How could the most controversial pictures in the history of science have become some of the most widely seen?
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In Haeckeland#8217;s Embryos, Nick Hopwood tells this extraordinary story in full for the first time. He tracks the drawings and the charges against them from their genesis in the nineteenth century to their continuing involvement in innovation in the present day, and from Germany to Britain and the United States. Emphasizing the changes worked by circulation and copying, interpretation and debate, Hopwood uses the case to explore how pictures succeed and fail, gain acceptance and spark controversy. Along the way, he reveals how embryonic development was made a process that we can see, compare, and discuss, and how copyingand#151;usually dismissed as unoriginaland#151;can be creative, contested, and consequential.
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With a wealth of expertly contextualized illustrations, Haeckeland#8217;s Embryos recaptures the shocking novelty of pictures that enthralled schoolchildren and outraged priests, and highlights the remarkable ways these images kept on shaping knowledge as they aged.
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"Fascinating and rigorously documented. . . . Recommended."--Choice
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and#8220;Morganand#8217;s book is important. Icons of Life provides a crucial resource for historians of medicine, anatomy, science and reproduction.and#8221;
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and#8220;Morgan has done a masterful and truly respectful job discerning what it is that embryos might tell us about the shifting organization and logic of collective life.and#8221;
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and#8220;A remarkable work that seems destined to have a significant impact both within and well beyond anthropology.and#8221;
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“A remarkable work that seems destined to have a significant impact both within and well beyond anthropology.” Janelle S. Taylor, University of Washington
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“Fascinating and rigorously documented. . . . Recommended.” American Anthropologist
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"This book masterfully reconstructs the controversies surrounding Ernst Haeckeland#8217;s infamous diagrams comparing the embryos of different species. Hopwoodand#8217;s powerful and compelling narrative reveals how these images became enmeshed in fundamental questions about visual representation, scientific fraud, relations between science and religion, and interactions between scientists and their publics. Haeckeland#8217;s Embryos is a transformative study of scientific controversy that should be required reading for every student of science.and#8221;
Review
Ernst Haeckel, the best known German Darwinist of his day, was also the most controversial. For nearly a century and a half his widely circulated series of animal and human embryos, illustrating common descent, have prompted charges of forgery and fraud from scientific, religious, and political critics. Antievolutionists, especially advocates of intelligent design, have been among his most outspoken detractors. One can only hope that Nick Hopwoodand#8217;s scrupulously researched and evenhandedly argued book will finally lay these longstanding controversies to rest.
Review
Nick Hopwood has written a meticulous and engaging history that sets a high bar for future print and visual culture studies. Haeckeland#8217;s Embryos shows the material, intellectual, and cultural conditions under which the hidden is rendered visible and the visible rendered standard, amidst contestation at every turn. Open it, andand#8212;after you have recovered from its spectacular imagesand#8212;read it, for this is history of science at its best.
Review
Certain images in science capture the imagination and take on a life of their own. In this excellent book, surely the definitive account of the afterlife of scientific images, Nick Hopwood examines the most iconic pictures of vertebrate embryos, those first produced by German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel in 1868. These images have been repeatedly caught up in anti-Darwinist debates and to this day have been subject to charges of scientific fraud. In tracking Haeckeland#8217;s embryos, Hopwood restores the full sound and fury of history to the act of looking at what humans are and where we came from.
Review
andquot;Hopwood raises important questions (particularly pertinent to the modern era of viral memes) about the teaching of empirical science and the bringing of complex scientific ideas to the public, the and#39;boundary of popular literature and specialist work,and#39; the relationship between the observer as accurate reporter and as artist, and the line beyond which schematization for didactic or rhetorical effect becomes deliberately misleading.andquot;
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andquot;Detailed, well documented, and rich with illustrations. It is likely to be of most value to those with interests in developmental biology, embryology, the history of attacks on evolution, or the history of scientific publication.andquot;
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and#8220;Fascinating and rigorously documented. . . . Recommended.and#8221;
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andquot;Rarely have images proved so incendiary as the embryo drawings of nineteenth-century experimental zoologist Ernst Haeckel. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Nick Hopwood traces the chequered history of the sketches, which showed similarities between embryos of higher and lower vertebrates, including humans, at particular points in their development. Haeckel intended the images as support for Charles Darwinand#39;s evolutionary theory, but under attack revealed that they were schematics. Hopwood meticulously charts how, despite the controversy, the drawings took on a life of their own.andquot;
Review
andquot;Sumptuous. . . . Hopwoodand#39;s excellent, thought-provoking book makes us ponder how these erroneous illustrations acquired their iconic status, and, above all, it shines a spotlight on the power of drawings to influence our thinking.andquot;
Synopsis
Icons of Life tells the engrossing and provocative story of an early twentieth-century undertaking, the Carnegie Institution of Washington's project to collect thousands of embryos for scientific study. Lynn M. Morgan blends social analysis, sleuthing, and humor to trace the history of specimen collecting. In the process, she illuminates how a hundred-year-old scientific endeavor continues to be felt in today's fraught arena of maternal and fetal politics. Until the embryo collecting project-which she follows from the Johns Hopkins anatomy department, through Baltimore foundling homes, and all the way to China-most people had no idea what human embryos looked like. But by the 1950s, modern citizens saw in embryos an image of and#147;ourselves unborn,and#8221; and embryology had developed a biologically based story about how we came to be. Morgan explains how dead specimens paradoxically became icons of life, how embryos were generated as social artifacts separate from pregnant women, and how a fetus thwarted Gertrude Stein's medical career. By resurrecting a nearly forgotten scientific project, Morgan sheds light on the roots of a modern origin story and raises the still controversial issue of how we decide what embryos mean.
Synopsis
"Fascinating!
Icons of Life is an account of how we have come to know ourselves as ourselves, both a compelling human origin story and an engaging tale of intellectual curiosity, biological specimens, reproductive politics, and science. Morgan draws skillfully on her ethnographic toolkit to reveal the social context of embryology alongside the cultural and scientific work of crafting objective 'facts of life' from unremarkable flesh."and#151;Monica J. Casper, author of
The Making of the Unborn Patient"How do scientists convert people into things? Lynn Morgan's book takes the reader on a wonderfully eerie tour through the cultural history of a macabre science, that of collecting human embryos. Not only is it an immensely valuable contribution to the anthropology of science, but it represents at the same time an extended hand across the field of anthropology, where the remains of human beings are still commonly passed around tables of undergraduate studentsand#151;inviting us to reconsider the nature of our own scientific specimens."and#151;Jonathan Marks, author of Why I Am Not A Scientist
About the Author
Nick Hopwood is reader in history of science and medicine in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Embryos in Wax, coeditor of Models: The Third Dimension of Science, and cocurator of the online exhibition Making Visible Embryos.
Table of Contents
1and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Icons of Knowledge
2and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Two Small Embryos in Spirits of Wine
3and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Like Flies on the Parlor Ceiling
4and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Drawing and Darwinism
5and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Illustrating the Magic Word
6and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Professors and Progress
7and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Visual Strategies
8and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Schematics, Forgery, and the So-Called Educated
9and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Imperial Grids
10and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Setting Standards
11and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Forbidden Fruit
12and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Creative Copying
13and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Trials and Tributes
14and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Scandal for the People
15and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; A Hundred Haeckels
16and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; The Textbook Illustration
17and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Iconoclasm
18and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; The Shock of the Copy
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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